NITI Aayog, the Indian government's policy agency, is building a test system for blockchain applications in education, health and agriculture. An official who spoke with the Economic Times described t
NITI Aayog, the Indian government's policy agency, is building a test system for blockchain applications in education, health and agriculture. An official who spoke with the Economic Times described the technology as "a safe system for document verification and hence can be adopted in sectors like education, health and agriculture."
The agency's push follows a blockchain hackathon it organized in November at IIT Delhi. The event ran from November 10th through 13th, 2017 and drew 1,900 students and professionals from 28 countries, with participants both on-site and from distant locations. NITI Aayog ran the competition with Proffer, a blockchain startup founded by MIT and Harvard graduates. Microsoft, IBM, Accel, Coinbase and Amazon AWS backed the competition with $17,000 in prizes.
AgroChain took first place. The platform lets farmers list crops and projected yields on a public ledger so consumers can verify the farmer's history and reliability. The ledger maintains a transparent, unalterable record of transactions. A rating system will later let farmers and consumers build track records in the agricultural marketplace. AgroChain's creators are research students from the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala.
Other competition winners included SureFly, an insurance product for flight delays funded through crowdsourcing, Open Complaint Network, a decentralized system for filing civil and criminal complaints, Betoken, a decentralized hedge fund focused on social impact investing, and chAIn, which combines artificial intelligence with homomorphic encryption to protect data privacy.
NITI Aayog is working on IndiaChain, a blockchain network meant to span the country. The project targets four goals: reducing corruption and fraud, making contract enforcement faster, increasing transaction transparency and strengthening agriculture. The agency plans to connect IndiaChain to India Stack, a collection of APIs that gives governments, businesses, startups and developers access to a shared digital foundation.
One official told the Indian Express that NITI Aayog is drafting a strategy document on blockchain in India. The paper will "outline use cases as well as map out the schemes of the government of India that stand to benefit from the utilization of the technology." The agency is exploring "ways in which blockchain can transform governance for India," the official added.
